Granny Hole outside her shop in St Jude's in Bristol, probably sometime in the 1920s when Granny was in her 50s.

Snapshot: Granny Hole, a woman of substance

My maternal grandmother, Margaret Emma Nash, was born in 1870, into a family of shoemakers, and grew up in the dirt-poor parish of St Jude's in central Bristol. She married William Hole, a Cornish sailor from Penzance, and they took rooms near her parents. In 1896, Lilian (my mum) was born, followed three years later by my Aunt Rosina (known as Rose), who was born with a disability affecting her feet.

Since William was often away for weeks on end, serving on inshore boats that traded up and down the Bristol Channel, Margaret had to work long hours in the nearby pickle factory to put food in the mouths of her babes. William seems to have been a feckless husband and father, not infrequently returning home bearing just a bunch of bananas from the docks, having spent his wages on drink en route. On 20 August 1903, when the schooner Rhondda foundered in the Bristol Channel, three of the crew, including William, went missing presumed drowned.

Later, a rather decomposed body was recovered, and Granny was summoned to identify it. Her brother Phillip went with her, and was only able to identify William from the bespoke boots he had made for him. They had high heels designed to grip ropes crossing a boat's deck. Margaret was 33, a widow without means, living back with her elderly parents, and with two daughters to support, one of them disabled.

From these dire circumstances (and cleaning bottles in the pickle factory), Margaret was rescued by the £100 she received in compensation from the boat's owners for the loss of her husband. With it, she bought the shop in the photograph, around the corner from her parents. Locals always referred to the business as Granny Holes's. It sold confectionery, cigarettes, basic groceries and dairy products – eggs, milk from a big churn and cheese sliced from a large block.

Granny lived over the shop with Rose, but also bought the terrace house next door, took in lodgers and provided a home there for her daughter Lilian after her subsequent marriage to Dad. Here I, and my two brothers, spent our childhood years. Aunt Rose had little schooling, but used to help in the shop as a child; and all her life was very sharp in money matters. These were lean times, and Granny Hole was known for her generosity in extending more or less indefinite credit to the hard-pressed among her customers. Both premises were subject to compulsory purchase when the slums of St Jude's were cleared; and in 1936 we all moved into the (slightly) upmarket neighbouring parish of St Paul's.

From her dress in the photograph, Granny Hole looks a really elderly person, yet she was probably in her 50s when it was taken. She was only 68 when she died in 1938. I remember her as a gentle, generous person, entirely without bitterness, and greatly regret that I wasn't old enough to ask her more about her early struggles. But, even in bare outline, what a life!

Eileen Clark

Playlist: Our very own fairytale princess

Once Upon a Dream by Sammy Fain and Jack Lawrence (Sleeping Beauty)

I know you/ I walked with you once upon a dream / I know you

When she was three and I was pregnant with her sister, my daughter became obsessed with the Disney film Sleeping Beauty. Three scenes in particular she would watch again and again. Two involved the good fairies. First, when they plot how to guard the baby against the wicked fairy's curse. Next, when they make a birthday cake and a new dress for the princess, now a teenager.

But the moment that exerted an almost mesmeric hold was when the princess, bathed in luminous green light, is drawn through the fireplace and up a staircase in the palace by the bad magic of Maleficent and commanded by her evilly sonorous voice to "touch the spindle".

The story has a happy ending, of course, and the princess and her prince waltz off into the sunset to Tchaikovsky. Unlike Disney's other fairytales, Sleeping Beauty has no original score. The studio commissioned one but ditched it, and Disney asked composer Sammy Fain and lyricist Jack Lawrence to write some words to go with the ballet theme instead.

They did, and so after watching our DVD for the umpteenth time theirs were the words in my head: "I know you/ I walked with you once upon a dream./ I know you/ The gleam in your eyes is so familiar a gleam./ Yes, I know it's true/ That visions are seldom all they seem/ But if I know you, I know what you'll do/ You'll love me at once/ The way you did once upon a dream."

This is the song my second daughter was born to. I sang it to my husband, round and round, when the delivery became complicated and I lay fearful, mercifully numb from an epidural, as the doctors took over.

It's a soppy song, but overflowing with confidence. Yes, they knew what they were doing and our baby would safely arrive! It brought comfortingly close the last person in the world we would have had there with us: our three-year-old. When she visited her new sister in hospital the next day, she wore her fairy dress. Susanna Rustin

We love to eat: Gag's ground rice tarts

Ingredients

For the pastry:4oz (115g) lard or butter for a richer pastry8oz (225g) plain flourPinch of salt

Makes about 24 tarts. Make the pastry by rubbing the fat into the flour and salt. Add a little cold water to mix into a ball. Leave to rest in the fridge. Roll out quite thinly and cut out to fit the individual holes of a jam tart or mince pie tin. Put about ¾ teaspoon of raspberry jam into the bottom of each. For the filling, cream the butter and sugar, then add the eggs. Finally, fold in the ground rice and baking powder. Put a generous teaspoonful of filling on top of the jam in each tart. Bake at 180-190C/Gas 4-5 for 20-30 minutes.

Every Christmas, along with the puddings and cakes, my gran, known to all as Gag, would make mince pies, which everyone else we knew made, and ground rice tarts, which seemed to be particular to our family. I never asked her where the recipe came from (she held it in her head) and I don't know if it has any seasonal significance, but to me ground rice tarts were part of the special anticipation of Christmas baking. Gag commanded the kitchen, her own or my mother's, and under her instruction I learned first to spoon the jam (always raspberry, homemade), then to make the pastry and filling. As Gag grew older, Mum and I would do the baking, but still under her watchful and critical eye.

A few weeks ago, my daughter, who is away at university, rang me. "Mum, the shops are full of mince pies. I need the recipe for ground rice tarts." The recipe has been passed down – from Gag's head to my scrap of paper to the email I sent my daughter. And, thanks to her Grandma, my daughter even has with her a jar of homemade raspberry jam, perfect for the filling.

Elizabeth Lawrence

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